Hold the Enlightenment (31 page)

“My mother,” Pelton said, “had her own problems.” He didn’t believe in whining about the past.

The school, which had been closed after the mass drowning on Lake Timmisskiming, was another story. “I don’t know anyone I went to school with who does what I do. That kind of experience affects different people in different ways. I think that will be my next book. I’ll go around and talk with my old classmates, see what happened to them. I want to call it
The Breaking
.”

“Sounds like a project that requires some sensitivity,” I said.

“Hey,” Pelton said, “I got sensitivity up the wazoo.”

And indeed he did. “I can go out and do what I do because of my family,” Pelton said. “I’m proud that I’ve been married for twenty-five years and I’m especially proud of my daughters. That’s where I’m grounded.”

We ordered another round and discussed
The World’s Most Dangerous Places
. “Look,” he said, “I try to do an intelligent book for intelligent readers. You’ve got a guidebook on Colombia with you, right? Now you’re here. Does it say anything about murder, kidnapping, war?”

“It’s a little irresponsible in that way,” I said.

“Exactly.” Pelton sipped his drink. “My book isn’t about seeking danger. It’s about finding safety in dangerous situations.”

We ordered another round and talked about writing. “The publishers didn’t want the last book I suggested,” he said. “It was going to answer all the big questions. You know, like: ‘Why is there poverty?’ ”

“You know?” I asked.

“That’s what the publishers said.”

“I’m guessing they found the whole idea just a bit, oh, arrogant.”

“Yeah. The imbecilic little shit suckers.”

He paused to drain his glass. Up on the TV, the announcer had turned to the question of who was really responsible for the mother bomb. Was it the FARC guerrillas, as the government prosecutors still suspected, or some other party just intent on sabotaging the peace process and making FARC look bad? Despite the rebels’ adamant protestations to the contrary, opinion seemed to be swinging back toward the former. “What do you say,” asked Pelton, “why don’t we go down to FARC-land? We can ask Mono Jojoy and the boys if they really are mama bombers.”

Which, I thought, is what any really good journalist would do.

Photographer Rob “the Duck” Howard had left for an assignment in Egypt, and Rob Krott had flown to Cuba for his own wedding. So that left just me, Steve Salisbury, and Robert Pelton as the only gringos on the commercial flight to FARC-land.

San Vicente de Caguán is the capital of the region, about the size
of Switzerland, which had recently been awarded to the rebels by the government as a peace gesture. It turned out to be a cattle-raising town where the inhabitants rode around on horses and wore cowboy hats. As we stepped off the plane, we met Lelo, a forty-two-year-old cabdriver who said he’d known the rebels for thirty-five years. Lelo found us a hotel that looked a lot like the cell block at the Bogotá police station, then led us over to the FARC office on the main square. Young, camouflage-wearing rebels, some of them in their midteens, sat on metal folding chairs out front drinking Cokes. All had assault rifles, machetes, and the odd grenade or two.

One of the FARC youngsters took us inside and knocked on a door plastered with a poster that depicted an American flag being flushed down a toilet. The woman who answered, a rather sour information officer named Nora, explained that interviews with Mono Jojoy or any other rebel leaders were out of the question without official “permission.” We thanked her for her trouble and headed back out to the square to regroup. After a fair bit of Pelton prodding, Lelo said he could drive us to the rebel headquarters on our own.

Twenty miles down a gravel road, we pulled up to a neat complex of newly constructed buildings. “This is the rebel camp?” Pelton asked. Lelo explained that the Village of New Colombia, also called Los Posos, had been built for FARC by the government in another extravagant peace gesture. Peace talks were held in the buildings set down the hill. In the main complex, we saw FARC members sitting at banks of computers, answering e-mails.

The next day, after a quiet night at Cell Block Hotel, we were back at the rebel camp attending a public forum where concerned citizens—businesspeople, academics, students—could voice their concerns to the guerrillas’ “Thematic Committee.” A young man from the private-tourism sector was proposing a “tourist-friendly zone” where no one would be kidnapped and massacres would be frowned upon. The Thematic Committee took notes on the idea. Presently, a new blue Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up. Mono Jojoy swaggered into the forum and was immediately mobbed for autographs. But the stout, light-skinned revolutionary zeroed in on Pelton,
who was wearing his usual vaguely military outfit of jungle pants, boots, and light green T-shirt. “You are CIA,” Mono said. “You have a gun in those packs around your waist.”

“I have cameras and batteries,” Pelton answered. “Are you going to kidnap us?”

Mono referred us to his provision that only millionaires would be kidnapped, and then he was swallowed up by the mob like a rock star at a concert.

A FARC public relations woman named Sandra asked if we wanted to meet some FARC women. She said she knew the media always liked to take pictures of FARC women, armed and in uniform. Many of the prettiest ones were in an outdoor camp, and were said to be bodyguards for leaders like Mono Jojoy. Some of the women we met there were as young as fifteen, poor farm girls whose main attraction to the rebel effort, Sandra admitted, was the promise of regular meals. “Yes, I have killed in war,” said a twenty-six-year-old insurgent named Lucero. “I take no pleasure in it. The army is filled with poor people. They are just like us.”

“Do you marry?” Pelton asked.

“It is not permitted.”

Lucero was, in fact, quite beautiful, especially to anyone who might have a fetish for women in uniform.

In fact, it seemed Robert was one of those people. So much for being grounded by his family. We had gathered several young women about us in the bodyguards’ camp, and Robert kept probing relentlessly about sex. We learned: it was not permitted to have a family—women were given a contraceptive shot once a month; and while it was not permitted to marry, a woman could have a companion, a
socio
, if she obtained the proper permission. When your
socio
was on the front, fighting, it was okay to have sex with someone else, given permission. Jealousy was not tolerated.

Two young FARC girls in full battle gear said they’d like to sing a revolutionary song for us but first they had to get permission.

“Permission?” Robert asked, amazed. “Permission? To sing a revolutionary song?” He paused until the women were gone, then said: “These are not my favorite rebels.” They had to get permission to burn fiercely but briefly. Or even get laid.

Later that night, back in San Vicente, we were at a café drinking coffee. Lucero was at the next table, sitting with a young civilian family, and she squatted down to play jacks with their little girl, the assault rifle slung expertly over her back. We watched the guerrilla and child play for some time, and a great weight of sadness descended on me. I didn’t know why. Pelton expressed the idea that had been clattering around unformed in my mind.

“There,” he said, “is a woman who wants a baby.” And it occurred to me that Pelton’s questions about the sex life of FARC women hadn’t been salacious but intensely personal. The way he looked at and talked about Lucero now was the same way he’d looked and sounded when he’d talked about his own daughters.

“These girls get passed around,” he leaned over and whispered. “They’re sex slaves.” I could almost see the sex-slaves segment on Pelton’s next show, but, for some reason, it no longer seemed so cheap and exploitative. FARC-ettes were part of every story ever written on the guerrillas—the leftist version of staged helicopter strikes on nonexistent drug labs. So how come no one had ever asked them what their lives were like, these media-icon armed cuties? Pelton, who thought journalists were pompous pussies, was better than a passable reporter. I admired him his outrage. The guy grows on you.

The next night, we were invited to a rebel party at a nearby farm kept by the rebel leaders as a kind of country retreat. For the occasion, Mono Jojoy, our host, wore a black beret with a gold star “to honor Che Guevara,” he said. Pelton told me he thought the beret made Mono look like a pissed-off Frenchman.

“Should we be afraid?” Pelton asked.

“Afraid?” Mono threw down another shot of Absolut, which was being passed around in small plastic glasses. “Ha, ha, ha,” he said.

“Ha, ha, ha,” we agreed.

“But you don’t like gringos,” Pelton persisted.

“I like gringos who want to help the people,” Mono said. “Gringos who don’t help the people …” He drifted off into an ominous silence.

We were all sitting on new plastic lawn chairs in front of the old
farmhouse about five miles down a dirt road from San Vicente de Caguán. It was getting dark and a rebel named Cristián was sitting across from us, filling the plastic cups. There were, at a guess, a dozen heavily armed guerrillas in our party.

“The gringo human-rights workers FARC killed,” Steve Salisbury said, “they wanted to help the people, no?” Three nonpolitical Indian activists—protesting oil drilling on indigenous land—had been killed in March 1999. After an international outcry, FARC admitted that it was responsible. It was thought, we were told by guerrilla sources, that the activists were spies.

A thin, intense man with a neatly trimmed beard named Ivan Ramírez made the case that the gringos had been slaughtered “in error. It was like when your planes bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia,” he said. “It was an error.”

Ramírez began speaking about tenets of Marxism: how the workers of the world should unite, because the only thing they had to lose was their chains; how religion was the opiate of the people; how an entrenched capitalist oligarchy exploited the poor …

“These are old, tired ideas,” Pelton said. “They didn’t work in Russia. Why do you think they would work here?”

“It will be different here. It will be Colombian Marxism.” Ramírez glared at Pelton, and the mood soured as total darkness fell.

“Come on,” Pelton said. “Don’t pump sunshine up my ass. In what way will it be different?”

Steve Salisbury didn’t like the turn things were taking and translated the question as: “You are very eloquent. Where did you study these ideas?”

“At the University of FARC,” Ramírez said. He glanced around fiercely, lest anyone challenge these credentials. “The University of FARC,” Ramírez said, “makes Harvard look like nursery school.”

Mono turned to Pelton. “Don’t take any more notes,” he said. “This is a party.” The vodka was doing its work, and Mono had begun slurring his Spanish. “Tell me,” he said. “You are really CIA, no?”

“I am making a film for the Discovery Channel,” Pelton said.

“What do you really want?” Mono asked.

“I want to film a real guerrilla camp,” Pelton said. “I want to eat guerrilla food. Go on patrol.”

“What is the name of your program?” one of the guerrillas asked.

“The World’s Most Dangerous Places,”
Salisbury said, a bit apprehensively, I noticed.

“You think this is a dangerous place?” Ivan asked.

“If you’re in the CIA,” Pelton said.

“HA!” Mono Jojoy said. “Ha, ha, ha.”

And so said we all: “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Pelton dug into one of his bags and brought out a half dozen large Mr. DP stickers.

“It’s an American military symbol,” one of the rebels said, handing off the jolly skull to another guerrilla. “American military,” the second man agreed.

If there is one thing FARC members hate worse than American imperialists, it’s American imperialist military advisors.

“What does this mean?” Mono Jojoy asked in a menacing whisper.

Pelton said Mr. DP was actually a thoughtful kind of fellow and was meaningful to those people who really wanted to know what was happening in places that were being ripped apart by war or rebellion, places where reporting was spotty or inaccurate or colored by political agendas of one sort or another.

The guerrillas behind us were talking loudly about kidnapping and the sum of one million dollars. They knew we all spoke Spanish and they didn’t care if we could hear them. They wanted us to hear them.

Pelton, ignoring what seemed to me to be a seriously deteriorating situation, described Mr. DP’s philosophical connotations. Mr. DP wasn’t political. Mr. DP didn’t take sides. Mr. DP wanted to see for himself, talk to the people involved, directly, and if there was danger in that, why, Mr. DP laughed in the face of that danger. Mr. DP was a symbol for all courageous, intelligent, fair-minded people.

Pelton, I thought, was veering off into some serious bullshit, a perception apparently shared by Mono Jojoy, who said:
“En realidad, ustedes son los monos.”
(“You guys are the real monkeys.”) This was a foreboding statement.
Mono
, in Spanish, means “monkey,” but in Colombia, it also refers to a light-skinned person, such as our host. I hoped he meant that our skin was lighter than his. I feared he meant that we—as obvious CIA military-advisor imperialist lackey types—were dumber than monkeys for coming here, to the heart of FARC-land.

In an attempt to defuse the situation, Salisbury began trying to joke with Mono, and at a furious and not entirely intelligible pace.

“Jojoy,” Salisbury shouted, and reached out to shake Mono’s hand. Pronounced “Ho-hoy,” the word was a common greeting in Mono’s home province of Santander. “Ho-hoy, ho-hoy,” Salisbury said frantically. “In English we have a similar word, ‘ahoy.’ We say ‘ships, ahoy.’ Ha, ha, ha! Mono Jojoy, ships ahoy!”

“Shit?” Mono, who apparently knew the English word, now thought Salisbury was likening him to feces.

“No, no!” Salisbury shouted desperately. “
Ships, barcos
, boats, ah-hoy, ah-hoy there, ha, ha, ha.” Steve was purposely acting like a drunken doofus. Better to have the rebels laugh in your face than slice it off.